1. Field of the Invention
Broadly this invention relates to electronic storage systems and networks. More particularly, this invention relates to the field of electronic storage of business and personal records over the Internet.
2. Description of the Related Art
Although facsimile machines have been around for more than fifty years, only within the last ten years due to improvements in optical scanning and printing have the price of fax machines dropped to a point to where most companies use fax machines. In fact, fax machines have become ubiquitous in most businesses today.
Consumers can purchase stand alone fax machines or fax machines in combination with other optical and printing options such as the Brother 6-1 MFC Printer which not only prints and faxes but can scan and copy as well. The use of fax machines and scanners have made written communications over long distances much easier.
Another technology advancement over the last ten years has been the advent of the World-Wide-Web (“Web”). The Web has become immensely popular largely because of the ease of finding information and the user-friendliness of today's browsers. A feature known as hypertext allows a user to access information from one Web page to another Web page by simply pointing (using a pointing device such as a mouse) at the hypertext and clicking. Another feature that makes the Web attractive is having the ability to process the information (or content) in remote Web pages without the requirement of having a specialized application program for each kind of content accessed. Thus, the same content is viewed across different platforms. Browser technology has evolved to enable running of applications that manipulate this content across a wide variety of different platforms.
The Web relies on an application protocol called HTML (Hyper Text Mark Up Language) which is an interpretative scripting language for rendering text, graphics, images, audio, and real-time video on a Web compliant browser. HTML is independent of client operating systems. So HTML renders the same content across a wide variety of software and hardware operating platforms. Software platforms include Windows 3.1/95/98, Windows NT/2000, Copeland, AIX, Unix, and equivalent. Popular compliant Web-Browser includes Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator.
The Web has made the access to information much easier to a large population of user as a result of the decrease in price of computer hardware and electronic storage combined with the increase of the throughput to many consumers such as cable modems, ADSL, DSL and WebTV™.
The availability of Web and the increase use of optical scanning technologies such as fax machines has not reduced the amount of paper used for personal and business records. The increase use of paper is due to many factors. One factor for the increase use of paper in business and personal records are that users of paper are unfamiliar with optical scanning technologies.
Another factor for the increase use of paper in business is the need for emergency backup of electronic medium. Many people lack the discipline to backup important documents electronically stored. Accordingly, the requirement to backup important documents stored electronically has slowed the adoption of optical scanning technologies to store documents.
Still, another factor for the increase use of paper, is the inability to access personal and business information while traveling. People often take copies of documents and information while they are away from their home or business for convenient access. For example, a person may take a document along with them such as a bank statement when going to loan officer about a loan. By taking a document with them, the user exposes the document to being lost, mutilated or inadvertently destroyed. Accordingly, a need exists to make the conversion, storage and retrieval of documents easy and secure for individuals and businesses to take advantage of optical scanning technologies available today.